Friday, March 25, 2016

Cindi Leive edits a magazine called Glamour. I have never
read it but I can guess what it’s about. Surely, she was the right woman to
review Peggy Orenstein’s new book about teenage girls and sex.

She opens with a scene that sums it all up, though in ways
that escape her:

There’s
a moment midway through Peggy Orenstein’s latest book that seems to sum up what
it’s like to be a teenage girl right now. An economics major taking a gender
studies class is getting dressed in her college dorm room for a night out,
cheerfully discussing sexual stereotyping in advertising with Orenstein — while
at the same time grabbing a miniskirt and a bottle of vodka, the better to
achieve her evening goal: to “get really drunk and make out with someone.” “You
look hot,” her friend tells her — and the student, apparently registering the
oddness of the scene, turns to Orenstein. “In my gender class I’m all, ‘That
damned patriarchy,’” she says. “But ...
what’s the
point of a night if you aren’t
getting attention from guys?” Her
ambition, she explains, “is to
be just slutty enough, where you’re not
a prude but you’re not a whore. ... Finding that balance is every college
girl’s
dream, you know what I mean?”

This is not new. Tufts professor Nancy Bauer described a
similar scene in a Times article several years ago.

The difference is: Bauer
understands that she is describing what happens to women when they drink the
feminist Kool-Aid. Leive does not understand that one of the major cultural
forces making these girls do as they do is feminism.

And yet, the woman whose idea of a great evening is getting
drunk out of her mind on vodka—vodka that she, liberated woman, supplies
herself—and then making out—surely a euphemism for what she can only do when she is blind
drunk—with a guy who she just met. She is living the feminist
dream, but is too drunk and too brainwashed to know it.

For reasons that do not require too much exposition feminism
seems to instill in young women a pathological anxiety about their ability to
attract men. These women so completely lack confidence in their
femininity that they are willing to do literally almost anything to gain male
attention, or, as Amy Schumer famously declared, to catch some dick. If that's your standard of success, you have a problem.

After all, if you have spent all of your time learning how
to lean in, to be assertive and aggressive very few men are going to find you
all that attractive. They might be willing to use you for sex, if you insist,
but that is usually as far as it goes.

Today’s liberated woman, fresh from her class in woman’s
studies might, if she is sufficiently intelligent, figure out that feminists
have been pimping her out to the patriarchy:

For
guys, she says, there is fun and pleasure; for girls (at least the straight
ones), too little physical joy, too much regret and a general sense that the
boys are in charge. Fully half the girls in Orenstein’s book say they’ve been
coerced into sex, and many had been raped — among them, by the way, that econ
major, who was so confused that when her assailant dropped her off the next
morning, she told him, “Thanks, I had fun.” The sexual playing field Orenstein
describes is so tilted no girl could win.

To be fair, Leive offers Orenstein’s list of all of the
factors that have produced this situation. I do not disagree with any of them. But,
why is feminism not on the list and why do these women not understand that
feminism has robbed young women of their self-esteem as women.

When you are blaming pornography, you should also recall
that feminists have encouraged women to be open and free and sexually
liberated. And that feminism for decades now has promoted a graphic awareness
of the female genitalia. Recently, feminists started having a national
conversation about periods.

Any woman who feels sexually exposed will also feel that she
does not have any self-respect. As for the last shred of her dignity… she will
drown it in vodka.

Leive lists some of the problem:

There’s
pornography, which teaches boys to expect constantly willing, fully waxed
partners, and girls to imitate all those arched backs and ­movie-perfect moans.
(Sorry, male college students, but studies show that the percentage of your
female peers who fake orgasm has been steadily rising.) There are the ­abstinence-only
sex-ed programs of the last two decades, which she argues encourage shame and
misinformation; and the unhelpful tendency of even liberal parents to go mute
with their daughters on the subject of what they deserve in bed. (“Once parents
stopped saying ‘Don’t,’” Orenstein observes, “many didn’t know
what to say.”) There’s alcohol, so much alcohol, a
judgment-dulling menu of Jäger
bombs and tequila shots. There’s
selfie culture, which Orenstein charges encourages girls to see themselves as
objects to be “liked” (or not) — a simple-sounding phenomenon with surprisingly
profound implications, since self-objectification has been linked with
everything from depression to risky sexual behavior. There are the constant
images of naked, writhing women, as well as the idea that taking your clothes
off is a sign of power.

However much girls feel abused or worse in hookups, they
prefer hookups to having feelings or having a relationship. Because the latter
might make them feel like girls and might make them want something other than
to be down on their knees servicing a guy they just met.

To be more explicit, feelings might lead to a relationship
and a relationship might lead to a commitment and a commitment might lead to a
marriage and that, my friends, would sidetrack the woman’s career. And we know,
for feminists that only thing that matters is the career track:

… girls
share that while an endless string of hookups can bum them out, many of them
prefer it to “catching feelings” for a guy, which would make them more
vulnerable. (The interviews also reveal an almost comical generation gap. When
one recent high school graduate explains to Orenstein that performing oral sex
is “like money or some kind of currency. ... It’s how
you make friends with the popular guys. ... It’s more
impersonal than sex,”
Orenstein writes, “I may
be of a different generation, but, frankly, it’s hard
for me to consider a penis in my mouth as ‘impersonal.’”)

Unfortunately, Leive and Orenstein think that it can all be
solved with more therapy and more sex education. A sad conclusion. It would be
better if older feminists took some responsibility for the situation they
created.

7 comments:

I admire a (not overly religous) father who told me when his only daughter was going off to college that he'd pay 100% of her college costs if she agreed to refrain from all sexual activity until she graduates, and he said she said "Deal, that was my plan anyway."

I wonder if it really works for a 20-year old woman to say "I'd really like to make out with you, but my dad won't let me, and he's paying for my college. Would you like to pay instead? I only have two years left, at $20k/year after my scholarships."

One thing that would help a lot: if people would avoid drunken sex. Not talking about a couple of glasses of wine, but about really inebriated.

Several years ago, a female friend had just wrapped up an unpleasant legal proceeding. I asked her what she was going to do to celebrate.

She: Get drunk and get laidMe: Hmm, bad combination. It would be sad if the lay-ing was good and you were so tanked you couldn't even remember it.Me: Why don't you get laid one night and get drunk a different night?She: Huh, never thought of it that way

Now she wasn't talking about going to the bar and hooking up. The planned lay-ing was by a guy she'd been dating for several months and she later married. This is an extremely intelligent woman (didn't go to college, though) who seems to have a real sense of fairness and integrity.

From an evolutionary fitness perspective, the female chauvinist's indoctrination of women and girls to greedily adopt a promiscuous orientation, to eagerly become taxable commodities of the state, and to voluntarily abort their Posterity for wealth, pleasure, leisure, and ego, is a rarely achieved victory for a master class.

That said, to be fair, the opiate of a pro-choice religion, and elixir of liberal behavior, are first-order anthropogenic causes of dysfunction in progressive societies.

Feminism is like the democrat war on poverty. If either of them had any sense they would have surrendered a long while ago. We have gotten more poverty and young women who are becoming the providers of young men's wishes.In both cases people have become what they protested they did not want. You have come a long way baby.